Memory Leak in SharePoint 2013 (Preview) Search

Any of you who has setup their own SharePoint 2013 box (and cried at the Hardware requirements) will be aware of a process which is chewing up your RAM like nothing else

noderunner.exe

There will be four of these running (you can see them in Task Manager) and these basically represent the four major topology services for the FAST Search engine which now powers SharePoint 2013 search services.

The problem is the current implementation (the Preview aka "Beta" build) has a memory leak! This was confirmed by a TechNet blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/mpriem/archive/2012/09/05/sharepoint-2013-preview-hungry-search-service.aspx) who also described two potential workarounds to alleviate the stress that noderunner.exe puts on your system:

Jose Vigenor from MS beta support pointed to two options to contain these processes:

1. Use Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced to reduce the CPU impact the search service has on your test environment.
2. Modify the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config so that it can only consume X amount of RAM.
   Change the value at <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="0" /> to any amount of RAM you like to contain the memory leak.

Be careful when you implement this though, Paul Hunt (aka @cimares) has his own blog post (which is where I found the link above by the way!) where he encountered some "Out of Memory" exceptions when this is configured a little too tightly!